MEANING from EXPERIENCE:  “What Begins as I, Ends as It”: A Form of Fiction

 

“Every movement resonates with its preacceleration and its overarticulation, active in a contagion of speeds and slownesses”

-Erin Manning, Always More than One–

 

I.

The erosion would be complete (or very nearly) now.  What had once seemed an “inner life” or “personal experience,” perhaps “individuality” or some such, (as far as could be sensed) was wholly in absentia.  No happening, event, or perception – let alone interpretation or meaning.

Now it was only something thesauri’d as anguish – maybe migraine, maybe ennui.

The emptying and erasure, incessant deterioration.  Taking it back to the cells.

•          Movement.
•          Terror.
•          Survival.

Formulating a system.  Psychology and reflection not necessary.  Systems in relation for persistence.  An added instant.  Another day.

            Flefzzhat, remune, it sounded like, and signifying nothing.  Activity is all.  Behavior.  Quieted, plastic, rearranged.  Emotion in hiding or exile.  It would not be decease, and he could not seem to help it.

It was cold.  Began to chill.  Unable, apparently to warm itself.  Something gave it liquid, which, though iced cold, seemed to flush it warm.  Reaction, not response.

Activity observed, not intention.  It shivered.  A scribbling, not a mark.  A murmur, not a sound.  It seemed deflated.  Otherwise.

Not like a rodent, really: not furtive or purposeful.  How to describe it?

A wrapped tree or  scarecrow – if the scarecrow was broken and crook’d.  What would survival mean, without love for words, without relish?  Without desire – is it pro-cess?

Dead crow in flannel.  No future envisioned, no breathing to count by.

 

II.

Room after room over months all displacing.  Pieces at a time – chair here, sock there, key, sign, and implement.  A picture.  Emptiness synonymed, a variant from loss.  Loss implies gone; emptied – gone away.  The figure shuffling toil devolves the way of water – seamless evisceration – an evaporate.

The labor worked like cancer on its host – a devouring accretion.  Humans call it grief – the impression of depression.  Unable to relate, all signs a bag of Scrabble tiles.  A tick will move toward warmth, grass stems trigger to the sun.  Scarecrow? – merely flux.  Perhaps the wind.

At one time it forayed.  The worlds of animals and humans.  Would have named systemic processing: “living.”  Drill down deep enough, or extend exponentially – the vitality recedes.

            Vitality recedes.

            Sonic elements, sense.  Beyond the psychosocial, even basic physics began un-mattering.

Another room, another artifact, another particle of dust duly removed.  The figure now a beach – sand devolving slowly toward rock.

Rock:  elemental, unfeeling, simply there.  Simply there, in its flux.  Taking space by making it.  Stupid, muted, dumb.  Pointilism sans points – that sort of thing.  The figure itself an oxymoron, an elision.  Not illusion.  From outside this is really happening.

From within, it’s only time.  The songs of Orpheus, collected as poems.  Dalliance in extinction, without a puffin’s reward or a dinosaur’s drama.  Just scarecrow – a covered tree – limbing in almost dark.

Prime example of nearly.  Nearly being, nearly attached, nearly meaningful – nearly perceived.  Nearly alive – another way of saying (in a scientist’s tongue): NOT.

III.

If a statement of faith is “always more than one” then here we have a really hard problem:  no statement, no faith, and ever only one…Beckett’s dissolution… How It Is.

“how last how last”…”vast tracts of time” 

IV.

It echoes.  The emptying room.  A hollow.  Blowing stiffly enough, some would say it howls.  If a howl, then a cry.  If a cry, a reaching out.  Scarecrow doesn’t cry.  But the drink kills the migraine, whites out the angst.

Wrapped tree in snow.  You know it’s there.

It, without life or blood or brain.  It now alone, now diminished, now slowly stripping bare.

            Call it the Passenger Pigeon, the Ibex, Orpheo rising from the dead.

Call it Nothing and No-one.

 

Please do not call it at all.

     V.

Someone said meaning was the sticky point.  Point dislodged.  Evaporate.  Another: “this is love.”  Love fucked and raped in eye socket, armpit, ass – then abandoned.

Another room cleared by the scarecrow.  More bark removed from the tree, even while the burlap clings.

Life would astonish the gods – an elegy owed.  It’s worse than that.  It’s autopsy alive – with light everywhere.  A copyist’s error.

            Branches clack, and make impressions.  That is all.